A Workload Characterization of the SPEC CPU2017 Benchmark Suite
Ankur Limaye, Tosiron Adegbija · 2018
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) CPU benchmark suite is commonly used in computer architecture research and has evolved to keep up with system microarchitecture and compiler changes. The SPEC CPU2006 suite, which remained the state-of-the-art for 11 years was retired in 2017, and is being replaced with the new SPEC CPU2017 suite. The new suite is expected to become mainstream for simulation-based design and optimization research for next-generation processors, memory subsystems, and compilers. In this paper, we extensively characterize the SPEC CPU2017 applications with respect to several metrics, such as instruction mix, execution performance, branch and cache behaviors. We compare the CPU2017 and the CPU2006 suites to explore the workload similarities and differences. We also present detailed analysis to enable researchers to intelligently choose a diverse subset of the CPU2017 suite that accurately represents the whole suite, in order to reduce simulation time.